


fool me twice

by Ayrith (freijya)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-05 10:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14042238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freijya/pseuds/Ayrith
Summary: Someone—maybe the force itself—must be toying with him.Kylo Ren and Rey’s force bond.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during Star Wars: The Last Jedi. My submission for the tumblr @two-halves-of-reylo week 2 challenge: sand.

****The first time, Kylo Ren thinks it might be a fluke. Speculative, correlative, a moment of weakness. But by the second time, he knows for sure.

She comes to him when he is at his lowest. 

For their second force bond, its the first moment in hours that he’s had to himself. While the constant stream of people talking and reporting and needing something from him makes him grit his teeth against the desire to fling everyone against a wall, the moment he is alone is its own sort of torture. He’s supposed to be surveying one of the factories on the _Supremecy_ but all he can think of, as he stares at the swinging robot arms and the shower of blue incandescent sparks, is the height of the drop to the factory floor. Of how long it would take to watch something tumble from here into the darkness. And to contemplate the nature of bonds and chains, how broken ones give way to new, heavier ones when the victory that broke them is hollow. 

So, of course, she comes to him. 

He feels the force shift, placid waves disturbed by a vortex that is at once luminous and violent, a cascade of colors from blue to violet that even in their darkest hue still burn him in their brightness. With it comes the scent of salt and sand, though he cannot say if it belongs to the driest desert or the deepest ocean, and also the slight smell of charred carbon that could be firewood but in this combination he will always associate with the green burning of Takodana. 

It is her. Galaxies separate them, but even faced away he recognizes the feel of her from that time—what felt like so long ago—when he captured her in the forest, and again on Starkiller. The incongruity of her force signature like a perfect storm howling around that slight form that tumbled unconsciously into his arms. That same storm buffeting him as she swung her blade with nothing but traces of his own experience—the parts she took from him in that interrogation room—his own training used against him. How it seared him, body and force, when her aim struck true. 

That she was the first person—girl—woman—he had ever held in his arms is not lost to him. His mouth drags downward, resentment curling sharp in his gut. This scavenger, this nobody, becoming unique to him in any capacity...

He turns, latching on to that ember of anger as a weapon. By the magnitude of agitation in the force, he expects to find her already waiting for him, dark eyes fierce and teeth bared, the barrel of a gun pointed at his temple.

What he actually sees makes him pause. 

She is not looking at him. She is standing, hand outstretched to some invisible thing, droplets of water on her upturned face and a smile curving her chapped lips. 

Like usual, he can’t see her surroundings. Just her. 

The fire in him banks. He would be angry at how she defies him, even his expectations, but there is something about the unguarded way she looks that tells him she will hate him more for this moment then any other, past or future. 

He watches in silence as her awareness of him steals over her body like a ripple on a smooth surface. Her shoulders tense, the smile on her face fades into something impassive. She does not acknowledge him, at first. Like if she holds her silence, the moment is not real. He will fade to nothing and she will remain unmoved. 

Among other things, he is a spiteful person.

"It is called rain," he breaks the silence, almost gently.

Her eyes flicker to his, and the resentment he finds there swallows his own paltry emotions and spits them at his feet. The force swirling around her is alive and it fills this barren observation room like a feral creature. It is almost amusing, how much ferocity is contained in such a small vessel. Despite himself, the corner of his mouth tugs upward just a little. 

Her dark eyes stare into his, unforgiving, and that too amuses him. She thinks she knows so much. 

"It’s just water," she tells him coldly.

He knows what she means. The _X'us'R'iia,_ raging storms on Jakku, spinning cyclones of towering sand and cloud and lightning that could wear away flesh to bone within an hour of being caught. A hundred memories of ramshackle cover float into his mind—the durasteel sheet of an X-wing, the door of a fallen cargo rig, the scratched walls of an AT-AT. He can almost feel her tallies, the mark of her days, under his fingertips as he is reminded yet again: hers was a limited existence. 

She has only ever known rain as a torrent of sand.

Pity flashes through him, catching him by surprise. It burns in his gut, this flagrant reminder of the Supreme Leader’s warning—he feels empathy for this girl, this random, inconsequential person, when so many hundreds of more important people have meant nothing to him. 

His emotion must have passed through the bond, because he sees her face tighten, her eyes flash. Ah, there it is. Her anger, a whirlpool in the force, heightening in ferocity even as his own cools, replaced with fathomless calm. And deeper, a sense of irony.

_There is no emotion, there is peace._

The words float up to him as if by grace, even as Rey takes a step toward him, poison on her tongue. 

_There is no passion, there is serenity._

Later, after she has accused him of being a monster, he wipes the rain water from his face and stares at his glove with growing certainty. One time, a fluke. But twice? No. Someone—maybe the force itself—must be toying with him. 

The rain droplets glimmer against his hand, defiant motes of light even as he clenches his fist. 

There are more stars in the sky, he thinks, then sand grains on a beach. A billion worlds, a billion lives. And yet, it is not they that he sees, that come to him in his darkest days. 

Just her. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The revelation in the throne room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My submission for the @two-halves-of-reylo week 3 challenge: scar.

"Young fool," Snoke sneers into Rey’s defiant face. "It was _I_ who bridged your minds. _I_ stoked Ren's conflicted soul. I knew he was not strong enough to hide it from you and you were not wise enough to resist the bait."

Behind them, time slows for Kylo Ren. 

It is sheer obscenity, how those words cut away the darkness and illuminate _so many_ things. Kylo may be vengeful, single-minded, prone to fits of rage—but he is not stupid. Snoke’s words are no simple betrayal—they are sparks that light a blazing trail of connections stretching so far into Kylo’s past that he can not see where it even started. 

It’s almost like a game of _Dejarik_ unfolding in reverse before his eyes: Kylo connecting with Rey, a bond created by Snoke; Rey rising in strength—nurtured by Snoke’s training of him; his conflict over the light—part of Snoke’s design; his _father_ —Luke—the whispers in the dark—

All the scars that Kylo’s viciously nursed—his parent’s failure, Luke’s betrayal, his father’s death, Rey’s defiance—fall away for the moment, eclipsed under the light of this jagged map he’s never known he’s had. The scope of it is staggering. Kylo is no longer kneeling on the floor; he is just anchored there, speechless. 

It is _humiliation_. The weight of it seeks to crush him, steal his breath, grind his face into the ground. He cannot even begin to contemplate right now the magnitude of disgrace that will come from believing he’d been forging his own path. That will come later. 

What he cannot stand—the mortification that drives him to numbness in this moment— is the latest wound; that he thought Rey had been _his_ secret. Despite his initial suspicions of their bond, despite his inherent mistrust of its purpose, he’d been lulled into believing he was standing on the precipice of something unsure, tantalizing, impossible. That he and Rey together, two disparate pieces on opposite sides of the board, were fumbling toward some new understanding that would shape everything he had ever known, everything that would come to pass. _They_ would cast aside the old hates and prejudices, the old conflict of the Sith and the Jedi; _they_ would create a new balance, a _new order_. 

And it _burns_. To have his presumption taken away, just as Snoke took everything away, with a swat of the hand and a ' _foolish child'._ He has no illusions that Snoke’s contempt for Rey applies doubly for himself.  All his choice and his actions, illuminated now in this pathetic light, are childish. Insipid. Pure arrogance— _obscene_. And with it, a revelation he must have known on some level all along:

Kylo is a tool. One to be properly manipulated—how could he not be? It was not only Hux that Snoke had been describing as a mongrel after the disaster of the Starkiller base. 

Kylo is no Skywalker, no heir to Vader’s legacy, no ideal dark apprentice. 

Kylo is nothing. Kylo is a _cur_ — 

Red consumes his vision—He will _rend the floor under his feet_ , tear holes into the walls, rip the very bowels of the ship apart, screaming into deep space against this realization, his body physically rejecting it—

—But a quiet voice holds him back. 

So what did a pathetic cur _do_ in the face of such a blow, from the hand of an apathetic master?

The red recedes. Kylo’s fist clenches. He has to look away, hold back the howling rage of force barely leashed in behind his teeth as Rey begins to scream and Snoke begins to _laugh._

He will bite the hand that feeds him. He will rip into its flesh and tear apart its body and leave the shredded corpse of his master on the floor for _daring_ to bring Kylo so low, for making him a mere puppet in his own destiny—

Time speeds up again. With it, Kylo’s mind whirls, calculating. 

Perhaps he is nothing. Maybe he is just a mangy cur. But _Snoke_ is not above miscalculation. His master sees the force bond as his, but cannot begin to understand that it is more than him, that he has no control over what it can become. 

Kylo _knows,_ with a certainty bordering on the divine, that if he makes his move now, Rey will stand beside him. 

Perhaps, afterward, she will not understand. Will not see what must logically come next. And he will have to _make_ her understand—make her see that she is nothing, just as he is being made to see it now. He has to show her that being nothing does not mean that you can _do_ nothing. That being nothing does not mean you will _stay_ nothing. 

Snoke, the world, the force—to them, Rey and Kylo are just tools. _Do not allow it. Do not let this stand._ He will beg her, if he must. 

As if from a distance, he hears Rey fall to the floor. He hears her hitched breath, can almost feel the tears that she bites back with sheer viciousness. It is so _her_ , and the raw beauty of it catches his breath, as it always has. A beautiful mongrel, his twin in the force, his light in his dark, defiant to the world and chaffing against a striking hand.

Kylo looks up at Snoke, certainty rippling through him like the eye of a storm. Perhaps, afterward, she will not understand. 

But she _will_ understand, now. He has seen it. 

And she will stand with him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't intending to continue this, but LilibethSonar commented on how sad the previous chapter is in the context of Snoke's throne room comments, and it made me want to explore that a little bit more. :)


End file.
